Stories to Tell

A little girl rushed up to a visitor at a school performance last week and demanded to be heard. “My name is Alanna Lynn, I am 9, I am a vegetarian, I have a mom, a stepmom, a dog and a hamster. This is my first experience writing a play.”

Alanna’s script--about a fuzzy pink killer bunny--was performed with great hilarity by professional actors, at Walgrove Elementary School in Venice. It was rated YDL by its author, which means “You’ll Definitely Laugh.”

Jimmy Morales’ play, also performed by actors that night, was about earning money for tickets to a Laker game. Six weeks before, when he was starting to write the script with the help of a mentor in the Young Storytellers Program, Jimmy was so shy that he burst into tears when simply asked to say his name in front of his classmates. On performance night, however, a new, reconstituted Jimmy was unveiled. He stood before the packed auditorium, grabbed a mike and gave an Oscar-worthy oration: “I want to thank my mentor, the actors, my family and friends....”

The Young Storytellers Program pairs fourth- and fifth-grade students with screenwriter-mentors, who teach the children how to write a play. The finished work is then performed by professional actors from TV and film.

The electric effect of having live actors--from shows such as “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” “Freaks and Geeks” and “Friends”--read the lines they’d written, lending meaning beyond what they ever imagined when they wrote them, appeared to stun the little playwrights--and their parents. The audience roared with delight at the humor, suspense and pathos of the kids’ plays.

Some were hilarious on the surface but fundamentally sad. A fourth-grader wrote “Jane’s Bad Day,” about a girl’s morning ritual: She dresses for school, then gets her baby sister ready for day care while her mother dresses for work. On this day, the baby refuses to eat or behave, then vomits all over her big sister’s clean school clothes. (This got a huge laugh.) The mother, afraid to be late for work, can’t wait any longer and drives away without her daughters.

The audience--which included parents, grandparents, and siblings playing tag around the chairs--never learns if the big sister stays home all day to care for the baby, or if this has happened in real life.

Many seemed content just to bask in the upbeat aura of the evening.

“Most of these parents are not used to seeing their children succeed. They don’t think of them as talented individuals with potential. The phone calls they get from school reinforce that view--they are not usually good calls. Our program offers parents a different view of their kids--it shows that they are talented and capable. It’s very exciting to see what happens when the parents perceive their kids differently,” says Mikkel Bondesen, 29, who is responsible for all the theatrics and who heads his own literary management agency.

Bondesen founded the Young Storytellers Program five years ago, when he was 24, had just arrived from Denmark and was a student at the American Film Institute.

The project, now in eight schools, is intended to teach self-expression and creativity. The child spends one hour a week for six weeks, during school hours, with a professional screenwriter, director, or other creative type. During that time, the student writes a screenplay that is eventually performed by people they may have seen in movies or on TV. And in the writing, the child is taught fundamentals of story structure, conflict and resolution, even stage direction. (“Shark-infested swamp, dead of night,” for example.)

Walgrove Principal Yuri Hayashi has had the storytelling project in her school every season since it started. She wishes every student could participate. “It’s such a once-in-a-lifetime thing for these kids to accomplish something so good, to get this much attention and be so recognized. They learn all sorts of skills. The mentors are young, very humanistic, they want to do something to propagate the arts--especially writing.”

Since there are only enough volunteers to mentor 10 children each semester at her school, Hayashi picks a mix of students who she thinks would benefit most--from severely underachieving kids to the highly advanced. “The mentors do not want to know who’s who. They will not let me tell them anything except the student’s name. They want to start with a blank page and see where the student’s imagination and talents can go--without any preconceived notions.”

The idea that this philanthropic endeavor was started by a 25-year-old recent immigrant is inspirational in itself. Born and reared in Denmark, Bondesen says he grew up with a passion for America’s creativity--its entrepreneurs and pop culture, especially its literature, films and TV.

When he came to Los Angeles to attend film school, however, he was surprised. “In Denmark, I’d grown up feeling my voice was important. Even little schoolkids there learn that self-expression is essential to humanity. In elementary school, we were constantly bombarded by the arts. It didn’t matter who you were, you had take many classes in crafts, music, art. We even took film classes in the lower grades. All that produces kids who believe they can achieve. After all, not every student gets turned on by science or math--and that doesn’t mean he has no talent.”

Once in L.A., Bondesen says, he quickly learned that schools here had suffered such severe cutbacks in arts classes “that the kids who needed it most had little access to it. That was a red flag to me. America is all about self-expression. This country has created some of the world’s greatest authors, musicians, artists and entrepreneurs. Especially Los Angeles, which is driven 100% by the arts. Film is the main industry--yet the kids who live amidst all this have none of it given to them.”

The problem “percolated” in his brain until he came up with a way to do something about it, he says. He and some friends at AFI developed the Young Storytellers Program--a plan in which professional screenwriters would volunteer time to teach children the essentials of storytelling through writing screenplays.

Bondesen says friends led him to PS Arts, a nonprofit that provides arts instruction to students at schools in some of the most underserved neighborhoods in Los Angeles. It provided the funding for his program to go into schools it serves.

The idea was a hit from the start, says Nathan Reynolds, executive director of PS Arts. “It’s wonderful. It gives children who don’t have a voice anywhere in our culture a chance to learn how to tell a story. To tell their stories. And then to hear what they’ve written read dramatically, by an actor, that gives real validity to the child’s work. It is tremendously powerful stuff.”

The project is very loosely arranged. Bondesen’s work brings him in constant contact with some of Hollywood’s most talented young creators. He recruits his mentors through these personal and business relationships, he says. And at the end of each semester, he and the other mentors call on their friends who are performers--to come in for one night and read the children’s plays for an audience.

It’s kind of like a pickup game, collecting actors for each event. “Traveling back from New York three days ago, I sat next to Dan Lauria, who played the father on ‘The Wonder Years,’” Bondesen says. “I asked if he’d come and perform, and he said he would. He might even bring the rest of the cast from the show if he can.”

After each performance, the actors hang out to sign autographs--especially the children’s scripts.

The parents are an important part of the overall plan, say Bondesen and Hayashi.

“We call them a few times during the six-week course, to tell them how good their children are, how well they are doing. And we only say it because it’s true. Then we make every effort to get the parents to attend the big performance. It’s very subtle sometimes, but it definitely changes their perception of who their kids are, and who they might grow up to be.”